This is a blog about the residential neighborhood around two Lutheran (Missouri Synod) schools -- Concordia College (aka Concordia Teachers College or Concordia University) and St John Elementary School (St John School) -- in Seward, Nebraska.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

I think my paper route had an average of about 20 customers, varying from about 17 to 23. The below account statement, for the four-week period that ended on December 11, 1964, records that I delivered about 19 daily (Monday through Saturday) and 18 Sunday newspapers during that period.

In order to apply the simplest arithmetic, we will use the third column, labeled "Both" (i.e. both daily and Sunday deliveries) and we will use the bottom part, labeled "FOR THE 4-WEEK PERIOD".

The row labeled "Your collect" indicates that the paperboy collected $1.50 from each customer. Since the paperboy had 20 customers, he collected a total of ($1.50 * 20 customers = ) $30.00 for the four-week period.

The row labeled "Your cost" indicates that the paperboy had to pay $1.08 to the delivery manager for each customer. Since the paperboy had 20 customers, he paid a total of ($1.08 * 20 customers = ) $21.60 for the four-week period.

The row labeled "Your profit" indicates that the paperboy earned a profit of 42¢ for each customer. Since the paperboy had 20 customers, he paid a total of (42¢ * 20 customers = ) $8.40 for the four-week period.

Since the paperboy earned a profit of $8.40 for a four-week period comprising 28 days, he earned about 30¢ a day, which was an average of about 1½¢ for each newspaper he delivered.

I estimate that I spent about 1.5 hours delivering the newspapers every day, so my hourly earnings were about (30¢/day @ 1.5 hours/day = ) 20¢ per hour.

In addition to the time that I spent delivering the newspapers, though, I also spent time collecting money from my customers and spent time trying to get new customers. Therefore I probably earned 15¢ or less per hour.

According to the Agency Carriers' Collection and Billing System, the paperboy was supposed to pay the delivery manager within the seven days following the end of the four-week period. You can see from the account statement at the beginning of this article that the four-week period ended on December 11, 1964, and that I paid on December 19, 1964, so I paid one day late on that occasion. I don't think there was a monetary penalty for paying late, but if a paperboy paid late chronically, then the delivery manager might eventually fire the paperboy.

Continuing with the hypothetical case where a paperboy delivered to 20 customers who subscribed to the daily and Sunday newspapers, the paperboy would have to pay $21.60 to the delivery manager within seven days after the four-week period. Since each customer paid $1.50 for such a subscription, the paperboy would have to collect from at least 15 of his 20 customers within those seven days in order to pay the delivery manager the $21.60 on time ($1.50 * 15 = $22.50).

The paperboy would be able to collect some of the money while deliverying his route. If the lights were on in a customer's house when he was delivering, he could knock on the door and collect. Mostly, though, the paperboy would ride to his customers' homes during the afternoons, evenings or weekends to collect. Often during such trips, the customers would not be home or perhaps they did not have the money available, and so the paperboy would have to make several attempts to collect the money. Therefore a paperboy normally spent three or four hours a week collecting the money.

The paperboy recorded the customers' payments with collection cards.

The collection card, along with instructions, can be seen in larger sizes here.

The card was about nine inches long and made of light-yellow paper, a little stiffer than a playing card. The paperboy made a pair of identical cards for each customer. He filled in his own name and address on the top and his customer's name and address along the left side of each card. He gave the customer one of the pair of cards and kept the other of the pair for himself. The paperboy kept all his collection cards, in customer-delivery-order on a large, metal ring that he carried with him when he collected. When he collected the money from a customer, the paperboy would use a paper punch ...

... to punch a hole in the space marked with the date that ended the four-week period. He would punch a hole in the customer's card and in his own card.

Practically all my customers always paid in cash. I carried a drawstring money bag to hold the collected money and to be able to make change. My money bag was something like this ...

... but, of course, it did not have a dollar sign on it. My money bag was made of soft, green cloth and it had a white drawstring.

After I had collected enough money to pay my bill, I went to home of Seward's delivery managers, Austin and Josephine Neihardt, who lived next to the water tower. Josephine received all the payments from the paperboys. When she counted a paperboy's money, she was extremely slow and fussy. She carefully straightend out each bill. She put the bills into piles by denominations -- one pile for the one-dollar bills, one pile for the five-dollar bills and so forth, and she piled all the coins by denomination likewise. Then she used a big, old-fashioned adding machine to do all the multiplications and additions and subtractions, writing each calculation carefully on a sheet of paper.

Then Josephine would slowly and carefully write an account statement, like the one at the beginning of this article, as a receipt for the paperboy. In the above receipt she calculated that I delivered 456 daily papers and owed her 2.92 cents for each one, totaling $13.32, and she calculated that I delivered 71 Sunday newspapers and owed her 13.5 cents for each one, totaling $9.59 -- with a grand total due of ($13.32 + $9.59 = ) $22.91.

Watching Josephine do this procedure so slowly was maddening for every paperboy. Another unpleasant element of the procedure was that Josephine did not have any teeth, just gums, and she often licked her thumb to count through the bills. A couple of paperboys got checking accounts just so they could write her an exact check.

I did not have a checking account while I was a paperboy, but I did open a savings account at Cattle Bank, which looked like this:

I tried to put five dollars in my saving account every month, which left me about four dollars to spend. I loved to figure out arithmetically how much money I might eventually earn in interest. If I deposited five dollars every month, then the total deposits would amount to $60 at the end of one year. If my account earned about 3.5% interest, then I would earn $2 in interest. At the end of two years, I would have about $122 in my account, and I would earn more than $4 in interest. At the end of three years, I would earn more than $6 in interest. And so forth.

These projected interest earnings were fantastic, but my fantasies went really wild when I imagined my accumulation of savings and interest if I could get a lot more customers in my route.

Robert Sylwester wrote:

Interesting. I just figured out that I made about $3.50 an hour during 1964 as a Concordia professor -- with a doctorate and a family of nine to support. It comes out to maybe 40-cents an hour per person in our family. So given the circumstances, you didn't do too badly with 15 cents an hour. As I recall, it cost maybe 50 cents for an adult to see a film at the Rivoli Theater.

Gene Meyer wrote:

Loved your description of the lady who collected the money. I can still see her licking her fingers and counting and arranging the dollar bills. I only subbed for Steve Roettjer and Jim Hardt…it was way too cold in the winter for me.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Three daily newspapers -- The Lincoln Star, The Lincoln Journal, and The Omaha World Herald -- were delivered by paperboys in Seward. The Lincoln Star and The Omaha World Herald were morning newspapers, and The Lincoln Journal was a weekday afternoon newspaper. The Star and Journal newspapers were owned by the same parent company, and the paperboys who delivered those newspapers had the same route manager in Seward. I delivered The Lincoln Star.

Peter Kolb, who lived at the other end of Faculty Lane, delivered the Herald, and my brother Steve substituted for Peter when the Kolb family went out of town. (See that Herald route list in this Flickr set.) Eventually Steve and my next brother Tim became a Lincoln Star paperboys too. My sister Tricia delivered the Lincoln Star into coed dormitories on the college campus.

A few boys in town delivered a newspaper called Grit, which was not a local, daily newspaper but rather a newspaper published for the entire USA a couple times every week. Grit advertised for paperboys in boys' magazines like Boy's Life. Grit printed articles with good news and practical advice, and it eventually went out of business.

The Lincoln Star newspaper routes in Seward were managed by Austin and Josephine Neihardt, who lived on the edge of downtown on Seventh Street next to Seward's water tower.

A bundle hauling truck drove from The Lincoln Journal/Star printing and distribution facility in downtown Lincoln to Seward early every morning, and then delivered Seward's bundles to a covered area along the back wall of the Seward Post Office. If the Neihardts were waiting when the bundle hauler arrived, they could receive the bundles directly from the truck into the back of their station wagon. (One morning the truck was very late due to a late press run, so my brother Steve bicycled to the Neihardts' house and was present when the truck delivered the bundles of newspapers there.)

The newspapers arrived in separately prepared route bundles that were bound with wire. Each bundle had a top bundle cap that was labeled by route number so the paperboy could identify his bundle.

The Neihardts loaded the bundles into their station wagon and drove to each paperboy's home and threw the bundle onto the yard. I often heard the bundle of newspapers hit my yard at about 5:30 a.m. and heard the Neihardts' car drove away. I got up, dressed and walked outside to prepare to deliver my route. Since my bundle was bound with wire, I had to cut the wire open with a wire cutter and throw the wire into the garbage. (On one occasion I got into trouble because a wire I had left in the grass wrecked the lawn mower of Alan Meyer.) Then I counted the newspapers and put them into my paperbags.

The paperbags were a pair of large, canvas pouches that were joined by a long, narrow, canvas neck. The paperboy would wrap the neck around the middle of his bicycle handlebar, and one pouch would hang down from each handle.

We Lincoln Star paperboys (and, I think, Omaha World Herald paperboys) all wrapped our paperbags around our bicycle handlebars. (Paperboys who delivered Grit wore their paperbags over their shoulders.)

I delivered about 20 newspapers. I think the number varied from about 17 to 23 during the course of my career. On weekdays the newspapers were thin and fit into the paperbags easily. On Sundays the newspapers were thick, and 20 newspapers filled the bags rather fully. (See a couple of my route lists in this Flickr set.)

I rode a one-speed bicycle that my Dad had bought me, used, soon after we moved into Seward. During my last year as a paperboy I rode a three-speed bicycle that I bought used.

It was dark every morning when I began. In the summer, the sky was turning light as dawn approached, but in the winter it was very dark for a while. I had a small generator attached to my bicycle's rear wheel-frame. As I rode, the revolving tire turned a mechanism on that generator, which lit a red light on the rear of my bicycle and a white light on the front. The street lights provided enough light for me to see where I was going, but the generated lights enabled car drivers to see me.

My route started just west of the water tower -- just west of the intersection of Seventh Street and Jackson Avenue. According to Mapquest, the trip from my house on Faculty Lane to the start of my route was about nine-tenths of a mile. After my family moved out to remote North Columbia Avenue, the trip from my home to the beginning of my route was about a mile and a half.

My route covered an area from Seventh street on the east to Forteenth Street (the swimming pool) on the west and from Bradford Street (the block north of the water tower) on the north to the south edge of town. Looking at the area on Mapquest and tracing the route within that area, I suppose that I traveled about two miles within my route area. So, the total distance I rode my bicycle was about a mile from my home (on Faculty Lane) to my route area, about two miles on the route itself and then about a mile from my route area back to my home -- a total of four miles. After my family moved to remote North Columbia Avenue, the total distance was about five miles.

My route ended at about the intersection of Eighth Street and South Street (a block south of McKelvie Road, which was Highway 34). My last customer was the Pollock family -- the father was Seward's sheriff, and one of the sons was my classmate Robert Pollock. From there I would ride through the town square on the way home. At that time of the morning, the smells from the bakery dominated the town square, so I often stopped to buy a maple bar in the bakery.

I suppose the entire trip took about an hour and a half on a normal morning. In the early part of my career I would leave at about 5:30 and return home at about 7:00. Gradually, I left later and later, so by the end I was leaving after 6:00 and returning after 7:30. Eventually I got so bad that I had to rush to get to band practice at school by 8:00, and some customers complained that I delivered the newpapers too late.

There was one old guy who lived toward the end of my route and who often sat out on his porch in the mornings when the weather was nice. He always tried to engage me in a conversation for as long as he could, talking about nothing. I didn't mind talking with him for a while, to be polite, but if it was on a day when I didn't have school. Otherwise I rarely had any contact with my customers while delivering the newspapers. (I will write about collecting money from my customers in my next article.)

There were a few homes with barking dogs, and some of those dogs did not get used to me even though I came every morning for four years. On one occasion a strange dog that was running wild bit me on my thigh. A man saw the dog bite me, and he took me to the hospital, where the wound was treated. The bite punctured my skin, but since the bite was through my jeans, the doctor figured that no dog saliva got into my body, so I did not have to get rabies shots.

I often encountered John Garmatz while he was delivering his own route. We would stop and talk. There was one other paperboy I often encountered, a public-school kid, and we would stop and talk too.

When the wind blew, it seemed that the wind always blew against me. When I was riding from my home to my route area, the wind blew against me. And then when I was returning from my route area to my home, the wind had changed direction and blew against me then too.

In the winters, delivering my route was painfully cold. I hated to go out into such cold, windy weather so early in the morning. I would get out of bed, dress and go lie down next to the heat vents along the floor in our house, trying to store up warmth before I went outside. I would wear two socks one each foot and two gloves on each hand. Sometimes by the time I returned home, I was crying because my fingers and toes hurt so much from the cold. I would rush into the bathroom and hold my fingers under lukewarm water for five minutes.

When it was snowing or raining heavily, one of my parents would drive me around on my route in our car. A couple of the roads at the south end of town (around the egg plant) were not paved, and they became quite muddy after a rain or after snow thawed. I would get mud stuck in the spaces between the tires and fenders of my bicycle and would have to push the mud out of those spaces with a stick every block or so.

One pleasure I had from delivering my paper route was that I saw the sun rise every morning. On some mornings when the weather was nice, the sunrise was beautiful, glorious. All the birds began singing as the sun rose. I would think to myself, surely there is a God, because our world is so wonderful at such moments.

I delivered most of the newspapers onto the front porches or into the area between the screen door and the front door. Most people on my route had front porches. A couple customers lived in apartments without porches and also without screen doors. Some customers had special wire holders or boxes next to their front doors. I did not roll up my newspapers with rubber bands, and I never threw the newspapers onto the customers' properties. I placed every newspaper carefully.

One morning I remember well was August 6, 1962, the day after Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her bed. I had not known that news until I opened my newspaper bundle and saw the headline. I hurried through my route, eager to spead the news to all my customers. I placed each newspaper as artfully as I could on each customer's porch, imagining the impact the headline would make on each customer. (I have no such vivid memory of delivering my newspapers after the assassination of President Kennedy.)

Toward the end of my paperboy career I sometimes had problems with absent-mindedness while delivering my route. I could deliver my entire route without thinking about what I was doing. Sometimes I would end with one newspaper still in my paperbag, and so I would have to wrack my brain to re-think which house I might have missed, and I would have to back-track to a house to see if I had left a newspaper there. There were a few times when customers complained I had not left a newspaper at their home.

I ended my paperboy career in eighth grade, because then I was able to get a job washing dishes in the college cafeteria.

The boy who took over my route was the younger brother of two sisters who were in our eighth-grade class for a couple months. These sisters had got into some trouble with the police because of their promiscuous behavior, so they were enrolled at St John School to straighten them out. After a couple of months, as I heard, the police caught them one night with some men in a car, and so the two sisters were sent away to a juvenile-detention facility. Anyway, a few weeks after these two sisters disappeared from my eighth-grade class, the time came for me to teach a new boy to take over my paper route so that I could quit. The new boy lived in a house on North Columbia Avenue, between my family's house and the school, so I went into his house a couple times while I was waiting for him to get ready to go with me. He was a few years younger than me, maybe in about fourth grade. As we talked while delivering the route, I learned that he was the younger brother of those two sisters and that they no longer were living in the home. I did not ask him for any further details about his sisters' problems, and he did not tell me.

After I quit my own route, I substituted a couple times for other paperboys who had to leave town for a week or so on family vacations.

For many years after I ended my paperboy career, I had bad dreams about that experience. The dreams were about me forgetting to deliver newspapers to customers or about me promising to substitute for another paperboy for a while and then forgetting to do so. I still have these dreams sometimes, although more than 40 years have passed.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Herman Glaess died in Lincoln on August 8 at the age of 83 . I have placed his photograph and obituary on my Family Glaess webpage.

After the Sylwester family moved out to remote North Columbia Avenue, we lived across a cornfield from the Glaess family. During the months when the corn was not grown high, it was about a five-minute walk between the two houses, so we were essentially neighbors. Mark Glaess was in our house many times, and I was in the Glaess house many times.

All the Glaesses had great senses of humor. They loved to joke and laugh with each other and with everyone they came into contact with. I think this characteristic began with Mr. Glaess, because I saw him joking and laughing many times.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

I delivered the Lincoln Star newspaper in Seward every morning from 1961 until 1965. For me, that was from the age of 9 to 13, or from fourth to eighth grade. Being a morning paperboy was a major part of my experience of growing up in Seward. I still remember my old paper route 44 years later, and I have retraced it whenever I have returned to Seward for visits.

I was recruited in 1961 by my classmate Ken Uhlig, who already had a paper route. Ken came to my house one day during the summer after we had finished third grade because he wanted me to take over his route so that he could transfer to a route closer to his home. He told me that I could earn ten dollars a month if I took over his route. This seemed like a huge amount of money to me, so I was eager to begin immediately.

Ken and I then discussed the opportunity with my parents. They thought it was basically a good idea, but they wanted more information. Arrangements were made, and a couple weeks later a Lincoln Star delivery manager traveled from Lincoln to Seward to visit our home for a couple of hours one evening. He interviewed my parents and me and explained the job. He then left me some printed materials to read.

As I recall, the Lincoln Star company had a rule that paperboys should be at least nine years old, so I had to wait until my birthday, November 6. However, I think that the rule was not enforced strictly. I remember that the delivery manager visited our home again several weeks after the first visit in order to complete the recruitment procedures, and I began delivering newspapers after that second visit.

One of the printed materials that the delivery manager gave me during the first visit was the The Newspaper Carrier's Handbook, which I studied thoroughly during the weeks between those two visits. My brother Steve Sylwester later became a paperboy too, and so he received this same handbook and has kept it all these years. When Steve told me he had this handbook, I was delighted because I still had a vivid mental image of it. When Steve then e-mailed me the scans, I recognized all the pages because I had read them thoroughly and repeatedly as a boy. I have uploaded the scans of all the pages into this Flickr set.

The delivery manager emphasized during both visits that I should try to sell more subscriptions to people on my route. Let's suppose, he explained, that a paperboy has a route delivering 25 newspapers, which takes him about one hour. The paperboy would earn about 30 cents an hour in that situation. If, however, the paperboy were able to sell 25 more subscriptions and thus increase his daily delivery to 50 newspapers, then he would double his earnings to about 60 cents an hour. Delivering 50 newspapers does not take significantly more time for the paperboy than delivering 25 newspapers, because they all would be along the same route that he travels anyway. This logic was clear to me, and so I studied the manual thoroughly because I was eager to double my earnings from $10 to $20 a month.

The The Newspaper Carrier's Handbook explained that this job would give me business experience that I could develop positively throughout my life.

Soon after the second visit of the delivery manager, I became a paperboy. I accompanied Ken Uhlig on the route for about a week in order to familiarize myself with it, and from then on I delivered the route by myself.

Of course, I also was given a Route List, which stated the name and address of each customer and whether the customer wanted daily and/or Sunday deliveries. Below is a Route List that my brother Steve has saved from his own route.

Friday, August 7, 2009

During the last weeks of my eighth-grade year in 1966, I wrote a Last Will and Testament, bequeathing various properties to members of the seventh grade. Someone in the school staff typed it, duplicated it, and distributed it to all the seventh and eighth graders. Candy (Safarik) Connery kept her copy all these years, and she mailed it to me recently.

I don't remember whether I wrote this as an elaboration of a previous school tradition or whether I created it as a new idea. I do know that in following years the eighth-grade classes wrote similar bequeathals to the seventh-grade classes, and these were printed in the school newspaper. For example, here is what the newspaper printed in 1968.

Candy, who works as an elementary-school teacher, told me that she introduced this tradition to the classes she taught at her school.

As you will see when you read the entire document below, I was an obnoxious little bragger when I was in eighth grade. Nevertheless, I do think that the document has stood the test of time. After the document, I have added some explanations.

THE LAST WILL AND
TESTAMENT OF
MIKE SYLWESTER
CHAMPION
OF
PERFECTION

I, Mike Sylwester, being of sound mind and body, do hereby bestow my possessions to all my worshippers of me, their idol. The reasons for the passing along of my blessings are as follows: (1) you can’t take it with you, (2) I already have too many good qualities, (3) unless the seventh grade is left some good characteristics it just might turn into a pack of juvenile delinquents, or pirates, or teachers, or even worse, they might turn away from their fetishization of me. So wasting no more time and paper, I shall proceed with the endowing of my God-given gifts.

To Lawrence Brauer I do hereby leave a cookbook of a thousand ways to make sloppy joes and a picture of me so when I have deceased from the presence of this earth he can bow to it.

To Laura Battermann and to Catherine Giesselmann I leave to each of them a book of Polack jokes.

To Catherine Giesselmann I also bequeath a picture showing all my muscles bulging in all their glory to be shared with all other female admirers on demand.

To Mark Glaess I dower my nose, that is to be separated from my face exactly one hour, eight minutes and forty—nine seconds after my death to insure proper freshness, so that he may add it to his already huge collection.

To all seventh graders in common I bequest my great good luck except for Karen Luebbe as she has already enough luck for the whole school to share.

To James Blomenberg I pass along my great speed so that he may run from mobs of screaming, admiring females if he is ever reincarnated as Mike Sylwester for leading a good life.

To the Heitgerd twins, I present equal shares of my modesty.

To all girls sitting behind me in music (Diane Neujahr, Marcia Middendorf, etc.) I leave ankle-length dresses to prevent them from pulling each others dresses up and embarassing pure virgin boys like me.

To Mark Klammer, my perfect equal, I leave 1 / 1,000,000,000,000,000 of a gram of each of my qualities so that he may truthfully boast of being greater than me.

To Mr. Rupert Giesslemann I leave $7.29 to all be spent on tranquilizers for my five brothers and one sister who are not yet in the seventh grade and I also leave him the warning “the worst is yet to come.”

To Ronald Rocker I leave him my height so that he may be approximately 9 3/4 feet tall. This gift has been awarded to him so that he won’t be shorter than Marcia Heitgerd.

To Donna Niemann I present a sign to be worn around her neck being plainly printed with the inscription: “Stay away from me!”

To all seventh-grade girls I leave my muscles and athletic ability so that they may win more volleyball games and please Mr. Giesselmann so that he might get a raise.

To each seventh grader I leave 17¢ to be wisely invested till the 17¢ has grown to $29.58. After the class pools this money and comes out with $1,300.42 it is instructed to build a mem­orial to me as the greatest St. Johnny ever.

Such endeth the last will and testament of Mike Sylwester. All remaining stuff will be buried at 134.1 degrees longitude and 72 degrees latitude on the western hemisphere. Over this plot grow a cabbage plant. After 18 weeks look under the cabbage leaf and you will find my successor who will be as great as me.

Now I will add my explanations.

The overall context for my writing this Last Will and Testament was that the seventh-grade class at St John School during the 1965-1966 school year was sooooo imature! Although I was in eighth grade, I had frequent contacts with the seventh graders, because our two grades participated together in choir, in sports, in lunches, and in various other activities. In choir, the seventh graders constantly squirmed around in their seats and burped and farted and giggled. In sports, they cut corners when they ran laps and whined about exercising and practicing. At lunch they ate with their elbows on the table and chewed with their mouths open. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. They were sooooo immature, that it was difficult to imagine that they really could even begin the eighth grade after the summer vacation.

When I wrote my Last Will and Testament, my main idea was to give these seventh-graders some encouragement and guidance. I wanted them to believe in themselves despite their blatant immaturity. All of my fellow eighth-graders already had given up completely on the entire, pathetically immature seventh-grade class, but I decided that if I at least pretended to expect some eventual improvement, then maybe at least a few members of that creepy class might begin to make a few baby steps in the right direction.

When all the rest of the eighth-graders had hearts as hard as stone toward the seventh-graders, why did only I have a soft spot in my own heart toward them? Part of the reason was that I was the youngest member of the eighth-grade class and was the smallest boy. The two images below show me posing with my confirmation class (Candy sent me the photograph.)

The bottom image shows me standing between two other runts, John Garmatz and Ann Marie Holtz. The two runts on the outside of this image were public-school kids, I think. (By the way, I had the darkest skin of everyone in my class. Sue Curtis was the girl with the darkest skin. I figured that we should marry and have kids, because I was interested to see how dark our kids' skin would turn out to be. I'll write more about this cosideration in a future article.)

Anyway, because I was relatively young and short, I could look at the seventh-graders and think to myself: There, but for the grace of God, go I. I was able to identify with them and to pity them, not just disdain and mock them like the rest of the eighth-graders did. Of course, I had to keep my kind, sappy sympathy to myself, but I felt I nevertheless might express my secret sentiments indirectly through my Last Will and Testament.

Of course, some of the seventh-graders had touched my heart somewhere along the way, and I never forgot those moments.

I began my Last Will and Testament with Larry Brauer.

I wrote:

To Lawrence Brauer I do hereby leave a cookbook of a thousand ways to make sloppy joes and a picture of me so when I have deceased from the presence of this earth he can bow to it.

Larry Brauer touched my heart one day when we were in about sixth and fifth grades, respectively. I still was living on Faculty Lane. A bunch of local kids were playing around behind Faculty Lane, on Hillcrest Drive. We had an encounter with a crazy older kid (I think he was a public-school kid we didn't know), and the encounter ended with that kid throwning a rock that hit me in the head. (I don't remember what the argument was about; I think the other kid was just crazy.)

The rock's impact cut my head, and I started to bleed a little. I started to cry, but I bravely tried to stop from crying. It didn't hurt much, but since I could not see the cut on my head, only the blood, I was scared that I was hurt badly.

Larry walked up to me and told me that the cut was not bad, just a little blood, and I shouldn't worry about it. I still was half-crying, so Larry suddenly told me a joke:

Larry: Hey, do you know what's the happiest day of the year?

Me (sniffling): I don't know. What?

Larry: Christmas Eve, because all the girls get a free goose!

Then Larry burst out laughing. I didn't know what it meant that all the girls got gooses, but I did figure out that it was something naughty, so I burst out laughing too and got over my worry about my injury.

I had not known Larry much before that day, but from then on I knew and appreciated that he was an extraordinarily funny and jolly person. When I was in his company, I always watched what he would say and do. His laugh was infectious, so all he had to do was to laugh, and I would laugh too.

The last year or two when I was in St John School, I had two running jokes with Larry. One joke involved Sloppy Joe sandwiches. I don't remember exactly what the joke was, but we talked repeatedly about how much we loved to eat Sloppy Joe sandwiches.

The other running joke involved us doing a little bow toward each other when we met. It was a Chinaman bow. We each held our two hands on our belly and locked the two hands' fingers together and then grinned and bowed slightly to each other. I don't remember how or why that little ceremony between us got started, but it lasted for many months.

Anyway, that explains why my Last Will and Testament began with Larry Brauer and about how, after I was gone from St John School, he still would be able to bow to a book of recipes of Sloppy Joe sandwiches instead of bowing to me. Larry probably has forgotten all all of this, but it still is part of my memory.

Many years later, when I was married, I used his girls-and-gooses joke often with my first two wives. (My third wife is Lithuanian and would not get the joke.) When my wife would get very angry with me about something and would get into a state of holding a constant grudge and giving me the silent treatment, I would approach her cautiously and ask, "Hey, do you know what's the happiest day of the year?" That is all I would have to say, because she immediately would burst out laughing, despite her fury. This same trick worked very well on both those wives.

Then my Last Will and Testament addressed Laura Batterman and Cathy Giesselmann:

To Laura Battermann and to Catherine Giesselmann I leave to each of them a book of Polack jokes.

To Catherine Giesselmann I also bequeath a picture showing all my muscles bulging in all their glory to be shared with all other female admirers on demand.

They were a typical pair of seventh-grade girls -- cute but dopey -- who hung out together and sometimes wandered into my orbit. I told them Polack jokes to make them laugh.

How can you tell you're at a Polack wedding?

The bride has braided armpits and everyone is wearing clean bowling shirts.

I myself had a more sophisticated sense of humor, based on several years of playing my Smothers Brothers records repeatedly.

Tommy: And then after the wedding, we all went to the conception.

Dick: No, not the conception! The reception!! The reception!!!

Tommy: I must have gone to the wrong room.

When I told Laura and Cathy a Polack joke, then they laughed and even howled, but if I told them a sophisticated Smothers Brothers joke, then they responded with puzzled looks and then hesitant, fake laughs, just pretending to get the joke.

The "picture showing all my muscles bulging in all their glory" was a photo montage that I had created the previous summer, when I had had lots of idle time. I had cut out a photograph of my head and a photograph of the body of a muscle-man from a weight-lifting magazine and then had pasted them together on a sheet of paper. I had cut and pasted the pictures as precisely as I could, so it did look at first glance like a photograph of me with an extremely muscular body. Then I had decorated the margins of the sheet with stars and lines, and I wrote some words at the top and bottom. I don't remember all the words, but the most prominent were MIKE SYLWESTER, SUPER STUD. Then I photocopied the entire sheet, so it looked more like a poster instead of a montage. I then showed the product to my guy friends, and they all got a big laugh out of it.

One day my mother saw my poster lying somewhere in our house, and she was offended by the words SUPER STUD. She thought that made my poster extremely vulgar and told me not to show it around any more. She said: "Do you know what a stud is? It's a male horse used for breeding! Is that what you are labeling yourself for everyone?!"

Since my Mom was so mad about my poster, I did put it away, but of course I did not destroy it. I kept it hidden until late during my eighth grade, when for some reason I felt compelled to show it to Laura and Cathy. Unfortunately, I don't remember the circumstances or their reactions, but apparently Laura reacted one way and Cathy reacted another way. Apparently that is why I bequeathed a Polack-joke book to both Laura and Cathy but bequeathed my muscle picture only to Cathy. The reason for that distinction is lost in my memory.

Then my Last Will and Testament turned to Mark Glaess:

To Mark Glaess I dower my nose, that is to be separated from my face exactly one hour, eight minutes and forty—nine seconds after my death to insure proper freshness, so that he may add it to his already huge collection.

Of course, I found the word dower in a thesaurus. Even now, 43 years later, I am unfamiliar with that word, so I had to look it up. It is a synonym for endow.

In the summer of 1964 the Sylwester family, Klammer family and Stelmachowicz family moved their houses from Faculty Lane to an isolated location on North Columbia Avenue. To the east (front) of our houses was a corn field, to the west a wheat field, and to the north a horse pasture. To the south were a couple, scattered houses occupied by adult couples we didn't know.

When we looked across the cornfield in front of our houses (when the corn was not grown high), we could see the house of the Glaess family, which had moved north of town at about the same time as we did. During the times of the year when the corn was not growing, we could walk through that field in less than five minutes. When the corn was growing, it was easier to ride a bicycle around the field. Anyway, Mark Glaess was our closest neighbor and so he came over to our house a lot to play with the Sylwester and Klammer boys. (The oldest Stelmachowicz kids were all girls.)

Mark was a good friend of me and my brothers. On Sunday evenings he sometimes would stay for our family's Sunday evening meal, which always consisted of ice cream covered with chocolate sauce and cookies. Then he would go home and tell his parents he had eaten lots of healthy vegetables and fruits. He had a good sense of humor, so I felt entitled to kid him publicly about his big nose.

Then my Last Will and Testament turned to Karen Luebbe:

To all seventh graders in common I bequest my great good luck except for Karen Luebbe as she has already enough luck for the whole school to share.

She was a very pretty seventh-grade girl who was a cheerleader. I was on the school basketball team, so she cheered for me whenever I was playing in a game.

That's me kneeling at the lower left corner. You can see the photo in larger sizes at this Flickr webpage.

I did not get to play much in the games. I mostly sat on the bench, and during those times I enjoyed watching Karen do her cheerleading routines right in front of me. I thought she was lucky in life to be so pretty and to be a cheerleader.

Since she was a Luebbe, I assumed she must live on a farm. Therefore I imagined she rode horses and took care of cute farm animals.

There were a couple occasions, not during basketball games, where I happened to be sitting near her, and I tried to engage her in a conversation. I told her I thought she seemed to be lucky in her life. (I didn't tell her she was pretty.) She would just flash me a smile.

She never was talkative with me, but she did not act stuck-up. She was reticent but nice. So, I mentioned her in my Last Will and Testament, in order to tell everyone I thought she was lucky in life. Whether or not she really was lucky was irrelevant. I was just trying to get her attention again for a moment.

Then my Last Will and Testament mentioned James Blomenberg:

To James Blomenberg I pass along my great speed so that he may run from mobs of screaming, admiring females if he is ever reincarnated as Mike Sylwester for leading a good life.

I don't remember why I mentioned James Blomenberg in relation to running and to girls. He was on the basketball team too; in the team photograph above, he is kneeling in the center. Maybe the mention had something to do with him likewise being a benchwarmer with me during the basketball games and watching the cheerleaders.

James was a funny guy I liked. I wrote about him already in a previous post.

Then my Last Will and Testament paid attention to a gang of four girls (clockwise from upper left -- Margaret Heitgerd, Marcia Heitgert, Marcia Middendorf, and Diane Neujahr):

To the Heitgerd twins, I present equal shares of my modesty.

To all girls sitting behind me in music (Diane Neujahr, Marcia Middendorf, etc.) I leave ankle-length dresses to prevent them from pulling each others dresses up and embarassing pure virgin boys like me.

Since my voice had not broken yet, I sat near a lot of girls in our seventh-eighth-grades choir. Even though I always tried to pay attention and be serious during our choir practices, these pesky seventh-grade girls constantly squirmed around and whispered and giggled. What a bunch of jabbertrons they were!

(Marcia Middendorf had a brother, two years younger, named Mark. About 13 years later, in about 1979, I was standing in line in the cafeteria on Bolling Air Force Base in Washington DC, putting food on my plate, when the guy next to me said, "Hey, aren't you Mike Sylwester? My name is Mark Middendorf." He had noticed my last name Sylwester on the name tag on my Air Force uniform shirt. So, Mark and I had lunch together and talked. He too had joined the USAF, and he was being trained to disarm bombs. We were stationed on the same base, but we never saw each other after that.)

Then my Last Will and Testament addressed Mark Klammer:

To Mark Klammer, my perfect equal, I leave 1 / 1,000,000,000,000,000 of a gram of each of my qualities so that he may truthfully boast of being greater than me.

The Sylwester and Klammer families were neighbors out on remote North Columbia Avenue. Both families had a lot of boys in the same age range, and we always played together.

I always liked Mark Klammer and enjoyed spending time with him. He was funny and fun-loving. He could make a lot of hilarious sounds. He could talk like Donald Duck. He could whistle extremely loud. He had a funny laugh, with a kind of cough in it. He could play the drums well and loudly. I intend to tell some stories about him in future articles in this blog.

Then my Last Will and Testament addressed Ronnie Rocker:

To Ronald Rocker I leave him my height so that he may be approximately 9 3/4 feet tall. This gift has been awarded to him so that he won’t be shorter than Marcia Heitgerd.

Like me, Ronnie Rocker was a small guy whose voice had not broken and who therefore had to sit next to that bunch of bratty girls in the choir. I tried to take this young fellow under my wing and help him learn the ways of a mature eighth-grader.

Ronnie Rocker had one of the coolest names -- RONNIE ROCKER -- in the history of St John School, and his yearbook photo displays the cocky attitude that I helped instill into his personality in preparation for eighth grade.

Finally, my Last Will and Testament addressed Donna Niemann:

To Donna Niemann I present a sign to be worn around her neck being plainly printed with the inscription: “Stay away from me!”

I don't know remember at all why I wrote this. It seems rather cruel now, but I assume it was based on some joke between us at that time.

Gene Meyer wrote:

I laughed out loud concerning your description of Larry Brauer. His laugh was infectious, indeed. Larry was a kindred spirit.

By the way, Larry was a product of a single-mom home. His dad died and his mom had three kids to raise.

His older brother, Denny Brauer (in my brother Alan’s class), became famous as a bass fisherman. He was on the Wheaties Box a few years ago (and naturally PETA protested).

He also had a show on ESPN, Bass Class with Denny Brauer, in 1998. Here is Denny's current web site, and here is another one to look at.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Candy (Safarik) Connery mailed me some pictures and other stuff that she has kept all these years. It seems to me that the photocopier she used had its contrast set at maximum. The photocopies are rather black and white, with little gray. I did like, however, the individual graduation photographs that she sent with this high contrast.

Some eighth-grade students paid to be photographed professionally in a studio when they graduated from eighth grade. They distributed the photos to their classmates as souveniers. I don't remember that I myself had such a studio photograph done. I think most of the students in our class did not have one done.

Below are the photographs that Candy received and kept. These students were in the classes that graduated from eighth grade in 1965, 1966 and 1967.

If you click the student's name next to the photo, you will go to the Flickr webpage for that photo. There you can click ALL SIZES to see the image in larger sizes. Feel free to download any of the images to your own computer.